Dear Muse,

Dear Muse,
How hard this is without you.  My life has changed so drastically since I saw you last that, were you to reenter it now, I am not wholly certain you would recognize me.  I haven’t been able to do any more work on my novel, though I know you desperately want me to finish.  I’ve tried to write it for you, in memory of the wild days we spent during the summer 3 years ago when we danced, naked mind to naked mind, in the desolate halls of an old military gun, high above the ocean. That was before I knew of your baggy cargo pants and propensity to wear long, shaggy bangs.  
I miss you. I do wish you’d come back, but I have no eloquent way of asking.

Dearest Muse,
What a wonder to see you again last night!  The rhythm of our intermingled spirits is the honey, the lyricism that flows beneath the letters of my prose and transforms them into something alive.  But don’t think your affect only applies to my words; when you are here my body transcends soft pink tissue awash with water and my mind is far greater than a jumble of incoherent images turned electric signals.  I become a vessel through which lives pass, a sieve that screens for expressiveness, for the poignant moments that endear a reader and leave a critic speechless.
  Thank you, my muse, for making me feel beautiful.


My Darling Muse,

We must stop meeting like this.  I know, how selfish and hypocritical of me to plead so for your return only to banish you again.  Yet I must disclose that our secret midnight meetings cannot go unnoticed for long; already my friends have peered at the purple circles ringing my eyes with compassionate confusion.  
I know they will never comprehend the complexities of our relationship, how completely and utterly I need you.  But, beyond the skepticism of society—which you, for one, know to be far beyond my narrow range of care—I find our brief throes of literary passion to be perplexing and unsatisfactory.  I ask you, how am I to fully love our time together when it fades the next dawn and the only memories I can hold of it are as jumbled and fragmented as the notes I scrawl to myself in the panting aftermath of our ardor?  
My dear Muse, I am beginning to feel as if I am a toy to you, to be excited when the mood suits you.  I really must assert some level of dominance in this situation and demand that you visit me sometimes on my terms, not only your own.


Dear Muse,

I feel a deep-seated fear that you may be gone forever now.  I did not mean for my last letter to offend—quite the contrary.  I love you, my Muse.  I would not trade the moments you’ve come to me unexpectedly—on trains, while bathing, and one time, famously, on horseback—for any prize.  I relish when you tickle my mind with the faintest whispers of inspiration that never fail to get me pacing impatiently about my bedroom, in and out of shafts of sunlight, gesticulating madly as I try to catch hold of flighty words.
But I have learned from this latest venture that I cannot force you, and so, my Muse, I patiently await your return.


Mysterious Muse,

Do you remember when we were something of secret valentines to each other?  You would court me gently in those faraway days, enchanting my 10-year-old mind with tales of far-off lands filled with magic and mystique.  That was before you began to drug me with metaphor, before your visits became hard and fast with simile and syntax.
I recall the days when I refused to let you have your way, when I’d write outlines of plots that you never liked; you would consequently refuse to help me, preferring to sulk on a corner of my desk, facing the window, until I took an eraser to the page and let you start anew.  We were both such children in those days.

Dearest Muse,

Had I known you stood behind me as I penned these letters, I would not have been so blunt.  You might have made me be so against my wishes; after so many years, so many thousands of pages I should be used to losing myself around you.  I admire your steadfastness, standing by me as I cursed your flighty nature; I envy your unpredictability for it makes you unattainable and yet keeps me wanting more.  Come for me my more than human Muse, wrap me in tendrils of your tender verse and bear me up to your heavens to play God to my imagination.
The most love possible,

Your Author.